Whereas the photographer can depict things as they really are, the artist can only depict things as he or she sees them – inevitably, it is the artist’s interpretation of reality, not reality itself, that one sees hanging on a wall or printed on a page. As one examines art from different places and different time periods, one can gleam much about that epoch, or at the very least about the sophistication of its artists, from how the artist depicts, and therefore sees, a scene. In two chapters from what I presume to be a larger work, Alice Elizabeth Chase discusses how artists’ interpretations of landscapes and how they used perspective changed over time and were different across the world, and what these observations can tell us about their peoples’ values.

In ancient Egyptian and Assyrian art, one notices that landscapes were largely two-dimensional, and little effort was put into evoking the feel of nature. Instead, effort was put into precisely mapping out what was where, what shapes occupied what proportions of the space, that sort of thing. Not much mind was paid to accurately drawing the things, just showing where they were, how big they were, and approximately what they looked like. Not until ancient Rome do we see in western art a desire to depict the majesty of nature. The drawings were still more or less two-dimensional, but the depiction of depth was employed in some instances. In a Roman painting of Odysseus by an unknown artist, the Greek hero is tiny when compared to the mountain clefts towering above him and the vast night sky – compare this with the Greeks’ own interpretations of their heroes, in which the person is the central figure, with some small trees and rocks in the background just thrown in for the hell of it.

Classical Chinese landscapes used some incredible techniques to simulate the awe one might feel overlooking an expansive mountain range. Often accompanied by a poem, these landscapes sharply contrasted the dark trees off the indistinct mountainsides, and the rugged cliffs with the empty expanse of sky behind them. Some portions of the mountain were even left blank to give one that feeling of being knocked back by the majesty of a scene. The landscape was considered closer to God than the personal image, which was for some time the dominant figure in European art – saints, Mary, Jesus and whatnot. But soon, painters and illuminators in Italy, Flanders and elsewhere began putting just as much attention into the natural settings behind their saints as they did the saints themselves. The presence of God was seen in every cloud, every gush of water, every patch of grass. Pieter Bruegel took this a step further and paid closer attention to nature than to the people in the landscape – much like Odysseus, dwarfed by mountains in that Roman image, Bruegel’s little people’s actions seem insignificant when juxtaposed with the infinite expanses of nature.

The landscape would become more and more important to European art, which meant that certain conventions were established, and a lot of them looked the same. It was time for experimentation, and in the hands of such greats as van Gogh and Cézanne, the purpose of drawing a thing became less about accurately depicting it, but capturing an instant in time, capturing a fleeting moment, or a fleeting emotion, or just a general sense of awe or anxiety.

As far as perspective is concerned, we can trace its development and see that it too was first relatively misunderstood and generally unused, then later on strictly typified, and then promptly upended by modern artists (but Chase doesn’t concern herself with this last point, at least not in this excerpt). The Egyptians and the Greeks got around the difficulty of displaying perspective realistically by limiting their scenes to two dimensions, which turned out to be a rather effective way of showing things relatively completely and thoroughly.

Romans began to experiment with depicting the way things get smaller as they get further away, but it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe when perspective was broken down into a science – for it was at this point in time where vision and light were for the first time studied analytically. Artists such as Uccello, Dürer, da Vinci, Pozzi and Mantegna were able to master their respective forms of vanishing-point perspective, getting to the point where they could experiment with it with extremely evocative results. Some paintings made the viewer feel as if they were on the ground, and another very scientifically depicted how it would look if one were to look directly up into the sky and see a saint flying up into heaven. In China and Japan, isometric perspective rather than vanishing-point perspective was developed and with great success – but to western eyes, it can look rather odd. In the end, vanishing-point perspective more accurately depicts what the eyes see, but “there are things that can be shown more truly by another system”.