Omvänt perspektiv i bildkonst och kontrovers : En kritisk begreppshistoria från det gångna seklet

Sammanfattning: Throughout the past century the concept of an inverted perspective, understood as a stylistic trait in Late Classical, Byzantine and Medieval art, has been at the centre of a controversy. The dissertation aims at giving a favourable presentation of "inverted perspective" as a critical concept with a fairly well-defined frame of reference, although efforts to make such a definition a reductionist, fixed meaning tied to a stable system of Geometrical optics will be regarded as unnecessary. Instead, the concept with its various, diverging meanings is understood as a vehicle, which might be sharpened and defined through its specific use in the process of interpreting a work of art. The concept is articulated through close reading and critical dialogue with actual users of the concept, or more or less related concepts. In the first part, the roots of a controversy are found in the conflict between critical assessments of spatial values in Byzantine and Medieval art, and an incorrect idea of evolution in art and visual perception. Secondly, rhetorical uses of perspective devices are contrasted with perspective analysis based on the central projection through a plane. Here, a genuine conflict is located, as the assessment of an inverted perspective element tends to make perspective theory too complex to be handled in simple models, thereby weakening its explanative power. The third part discusses various ways of understanding perspective and inverted perspective as mediating between pictorial art and perception. The usefulness of the concept of an inverted perspective is demonstrated through a number of critical discussions of paintings from different epochs and countries. Finally, this constitutes the origin of the concept in a prevailing basic operation of perspective analysis, reasonably termed "inverted perspective".