by Jon Lackman | 9 March 2010 | Books, Theory
In caa.reviews, Kjell Wangensteen considers Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, a new book by David Summers:
In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, choosing instead to examine a few discrete moments in the history of Western art. Over the course of four chapters, Summers traces the development of optical theory and its related fields, describing their changing relationship to Western painting from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. According to Summers, the depiction of light and its interaction with representational forms is a phenomenon unique to Western art that has been gradually refined over the course of Western figurative painting with the invention of other optical devices such as foreshortening, modeling, and the portrayal of shadow and highlights. While the development of optics is the principal unifying theme of the book, some of Summers’s most interesting insights stem from his discussion of the metaphysical dimensions of vision and perspective … Vision, Reflection, and Desire is an original and important contribution to the growing body of literature on the relationship between optics and art. Readers looking for an exhaustive treatment of the subject may be disappointed: originating from a series of lectures, Summers’s book provides a well-researched but somewhat disjointed collection of case studies … Vision, Reflection, and Desire nevertheless offers several compelling arguments for the ways in which Western art has been shaped by more than two millennia of inquiry into vision and optics.
