Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting

“This fine book celebrates the extraordinary influence that the ancient and medieval science of human vision — optics — had upon Western culture, not only on Renaissance visual arts, but also on philosophy, religion, and politics. Its message is a needed antidote to the current trend among some art historians to denigrate Renaissance perspective as an agent of Western cultural 'colonialism' and even antithetical to true artistic expression.” — Samuel Y. Edgerton, Williams College

“Summers’s fresh approaches to pictorial representation, perspective, and optics are a magisterial achievement, opening up numerous new avenues of analysis. Written fluently and elegantly, this book is a major contribution to the field.” — Thomas Frangenberg, University of Leicester

“Looks beyond the merely geometric aspects of sight to the higher-order activities of vision and the role of memory. . . . Recommended.” — CHOICE

“An insightful investigation of the intersections of painting, optics, and perception. . . . The general thrust of the book, with its emphasis on the historical and even human basis for perspective, offers an important answer to critiques which treat it as conventional or arbitrary.” — Renaissance Quarterly

“It is [Summer’s] ability to see through the superficial relationships that bind optics, perspective and Western painting to the threads that weave them together into meaningful structures that accounts for this book’s great contribution to scholarship.” — The Burlington Magazine

“A valuable addition to a subject often treated in starkly mathematical terms.” — Isis