To transpose three-dimensional spaces, objects, and bodies onto a two-dimensional plane – this is one of the moves that we need to trace in a grammar of multimodality. Linear perspective, it would seem, is an act of realism, a mathematical/scientific discovery of the early modern West: to reference things accurately in image in such a way that the image truthfully captures the empirical world for the way it in fact looks.¹³⁵

No, says Erwin Panofsky, this is a “symbolic form,” a peculiarly Western way of seeing and thus thinking that was invented by artists and theorists of optics in the European Renaissance.¹³⁶ No, says Norman Bryson too, this is a characteristically Western form of “the gaze,” an historically and culturally specific way of seeing, a mode of symbolic representation, as distinct from intrinsic being-in-the-world.¹³⁷

We want to frame the human artifice that underlies naturalism in somewhat different terms. We do not want to offer a different or privileged place for symbolization, a term commonly used to classify what may be considered as second-order, abstracting, cognitively constructed systems and practices of representation such as writing and imaging.^§AS1.1.3a In such a conventional view, our primary engagements in and with space, object, and body are viscerally experiential and in this sense non-symbolic. Symbols reference these experiential meanings, as well as systematically referencing each other. Symbols in this view are meanings-of, as distinct from meanings-in.

Instead, we want to argue that meaning by image or text is of the same order as meaning by object and space and body. No distinction should be made between meanings-of and meanings-in. We don’t want to distinguish what might be considered symbolic from non-symbolic meaning. Besides, of symbols, Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message”;¹³⁸ meaning-in is meaning-of. Conversely, spaces, objects, and bodies are just as able as text and image to “stand for” singular or generalizable meanings, if that’s what we take symbolization to mean. Again, meaning-in is meaning-of.

So, if we dethrone symbolization from its privileged place, what we experience in the meaning practices of multimodality is a series of transpositions between forms of meaning, shunting backwards and forwards, meaning taking one form then another, each form with its own affordances. We are always shunting because the affordances of each form not only offer new opportunities to mean; their forms also circumscribe those meanings. This is why we constantly find a need to call upon multimodal supplementation.

To address now the affordances of image, is linear perspective true to reality? Is it a “correct” representation of the spatial, object-filled, and embodied world as seeable and seen? This is what it suggests of itself, and though in some ways it is true to its promise, it is also more, and less. It is a method of transposing three-dimensional space, object, and body into two-dimensional image, and in the process a fundamental transformation of form. Here are some of the differences.

Linear perspective is the line of sight of a single eye, but we are binocular creatures. Since stereoscopic photographs, we have known that a three-dimensionality can be captured more than linear perspective on a single plane allows. Then there is the fact that our field of vision is spherical, so straight lines curve, but linear perspective corrects this because we “know” that things like walls, windows, and doors should be straight.¹³⁹ It is horizontally oriented, and it is not until the era of tall buildings that a vertical axis of scaling is added and parallels on the vertical axis are abandoned.¹⁴⁰

As for the objectivity of the image, this is only deceptively the case, because we are by fiat of the artist’s selection placed where they want us to be, most of the time conventionally at the height of an adult person, looking towards an horizon. We see through the picturer and for the picturer what they have chosen us to see. What seems to be an objective representation is in fact a deeply intersubjective transposition of the artist’s eye with the viewer’s.¹⁴¹ The body is central – the body of the artist and the body of the viewer; but the body itself has disappeared in the seeing. This produces an in-body experience that is also weirdly out-of-body.

Or rather, we are led to believe that the body is central in viewing the picture (and centrally invisible), for even this is an optical illusion. As Alberti so insightfully points out, the image is not in the place of the eye of the artist or the viewer. Rather it is created on a visual plane between the artist and the world, and between the viewer and the world the viewer is seeing through the work of the artist. This plane is literally framed, edges defined to include chosen spaces, bodies, and objects and exclude absent others. It is composed, with pictured things arranged across a series of layers receding to a vanishing point on the horizon.¹⁴²

For all the apparent anthropomorphism in viewing positions, the image itself is not located at the point of the eye, but on a plane placed between the eye of the artist or viewer, and the scene they are “seeing.” Alberti’s veil metaphor^§MS2.2b is a nice one, because the image plane conceals as much as it reveals. Feigned naturalism conceals artifice. Ostensible objectivity conceals the subjectivities of the representing artist and the interpreting viewer; viewing occurs not at the eye but an intervening plane removed from the eye. Deeply architected, this plane is more like a window than an eye, based perhaps in habits of mind that became ubiquitous after the invention of glass window panes.

And another difference: the image is constituted both in its carefully considered making and in its at least half-careful viewing. This is “the gaze,” sustained looking that configures in systematic arrangement what is seen by artist or viewer. Gaze is quite different from seeing, which is a series of glances or “saccades,” as the eye jumps across three-dimensional spaces, objects, and bodies. When seeing images that have transposed three-dimensional things into a two-dimensional plane, the eye jumps from the most prominent things and the vanishing point to which it is directed, to less prominent and peripheral things. The image is fundamentally different from seeing, and seeing an image is fundamentally different from seeing the world. The image ties a hypothetical, all-seeing eye to a fixed point, while in viewing reality the eye constantly darts around, every which way.

Apparent naturalism also achieves its effects by lighting scenes artificially. How could Botticelli’s Madonna^§MS2.2a be so perfectly lit? More likely in ordinary experience, mother and child would be dark figures against the natural light coming through the window, and if not, the outside world would be over-exposed. Our eyes adjust for differences in the intensity of light within a scene – this is another aspect of three-dimensional seeing, something that cannot happen in two-dimensional seeing.

And the presence of gratuitous detail: the book leaning at an angle on the shelf and the fruit bowl are unnecessary to picturing of virgin and son, except that their irrelevance speaks to the realism of the scene. They are things you might see and wonder about only upon careful looking. Might they symbolize something? Perhaps, but not as obviously as the sacred meaning of Madonna and child. We see the book and the bowl in a kind of peripheral vision. There, they speak more to realism of the focal bodies than any intrinsic meaning in these things.

Finally, of style: in their regularized artificiality, Byzantine icons^§MS2.2a show manifest style, a consistently applied lack of realism that distinguishes them as holy reference. Chinese landscape paintings, with their stylized brushstrokes and unrealistic arrangement of trees and peaks, speak to the presence of the artist and their work with the medium.¹⁴³ Realism attempts to hide its style, to speak truth to the visual powers of nature – and, as Alberti said, God as well, if He is nature’s meaning.

By these means, the three-dimensional world is distanced through an optical illusion, though the distance is by the artifice of image removed, transposed onto a two-dimensional plane where there is in fact no distance. This is how the world of depth is made virtual, and the virtual is a story that can only seem to be true. The world is laid out here to see on the image plane, but what it is showing is not there.

Realism is in these ways a technique of illusion, a series of tricks and tropes for the transposition of three-dimensional meanings to two. Its picturing, notwithstanding its disavowal of style, is itself a style, and more. It is a series of trompe l’oeil, manipulations, deceptions even, by means of which you are led to think the real has been represented. As it has, but also not.

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¹³⁵ Mark Jarzombek, 1990, “The Structural Problematic of Leon Battista Alberti’s ‘De Pictura’,” Renaissance Studies 4(3):273–86.

¹³⁶ Erwin Panofsky, 1924 [1997], Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by C.S. Wood, New York, NY: Zone Books.

¹³⁷ Norman Bryson, 1983, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

¹³⁸ Marshall McLuhan, 1964 [2001], Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London, UK: Routledge.

¹³⁹ Erwin Panofsky, 1924 [1997], Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by C.S. Wood, New York, NY: Zone Books, pp. 32–33.

¹⁴⁰ Rod Bantjes, 2014, “‘Vertical Perspective Does Not Exist’: The Scandal of Converging Verticals and the Final Crisis of Perspectiva Artificialis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 75(2):307–38.

¹⁴¹ Norman Bryson, 1983, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 102–12.

¹⁴² Gordana Korolija Fontana Giusti, 1999. “The Cutting Surface: On Perspective as a Section, Its Relationship to Writing, and Its Role in Understanding Space,” AA Files (40):56–64; James A.W. Heffernan, 1996, “Alberti on Apelles: Word and Image in ‘De Pictura’,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2(3):345–59.

¹⁴³ Norman Bryson, 1983, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 89–92.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 218–222. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Erwin Panofsky’s "Perspective as Symbolic Form" §MS2.2c