The Whisperers: Invidious Perspectives in Trecento Painting

Abstract

THE IMAGE PLACED ON AN ALTAR was typically frontal, symmetrical, and self-evident. Giotto himself did not violate this rule. Seeing as such was not problematized by altarpieces involving standing or enthroned figures facing forward. Off the altar, and especially in narrative scenes on the walls of church naves or chapels, Giotto and his followers edged beholders intomore dynamic ways of looking. In the cycles at Assisi and Padua, or in the narrow chapels of Santa Croce, one is always shifting about to get the best angles on the scenes. The Presentation of Mary in the Temple by Taddeo Gaddi in the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce (1328–38; fig. 1) as well as the updated version by Giovanni daMilano in the Rinuccini Chapel in the same church (ca. 1370; seefig. 5 below) are both in the lower register of scenes. To see the scenes in the upper registers, however, one has to crane one’s neck. Seeing better is a narrative theme in many of these scenes. Observing, witnessing, and contemplating, and point of view and viewing angle, are concerns shared by figures in the fictive scenes and the spectator in reality looking at the paintings. Perspective itself correlates virtual and real beholding, so intensifying the thematization of seeing in the paintings. A perspectival construction posits a viewer who serves as the basis for the calculation of the foreshortenings. A real viewer of the painting, aware that the composition has been determined by this imaginary viewer, sees a picture of viewing itself. Perspectives in fourteenth-century pictures were not mathematically generated but only estimated. Cennino Cennini at the end of that century described a simple way to create the illusion that depicted buildings and interior spaces possessed depth, involving the angling of architectural elements upward, downward, or sideways