Italy Part 2: Perspective

Our day in Venice was one of those hyper-reality experiences, an experience very reminiscient of my one time visit to old Jerusalem: Both cities are a complex warren of narrow streets and both are so familiar as a consequence of their prolific media representation that I suffered a slight sense of disconnection and a pervading feeling that I was not really there - the hyper-reality experience.

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For me Venice will always be the home of 'perspective'. Italian architecture, or at least what I have seen of it, is, like the latin language, very consistent and regular. The regularity and cubism of the architecture, means that when ever I see paintings of Venice the perspective lines running through it jump out of the picture. The ubiquitous water table provides a natural horizon, reference points, vanishing points and an x/z plane that pervades the whole environment. In order to implement a sketch all one needs do is visualise a cartesian system parallel with this plane and then construct the necessary perspective lines. The details are then served up automatically by the logic of perspective. Once I had grasped the principles of perspective when I was young, it always seemed to me to be a miracle the way my drawings sudddenly became three dimensional.