Putting Scopic Regimes in Perspective

According to Descartes, we come to know the external world through the deductions of the mind rather than through the senses of the body, which can be unreliable and misleading. In other words, we are “seeing” with our minds rather than our eyes. Using this logic, one could argue that an artist’s representation of his or her perception would necessarily say something about the artist’s mind. This is why these visual models are important to us as art historians. By simply looking at an artist’s way of representing a visual environment, disregarding even the subject of the art piece, art historians can get a sense of the historical context that influenced the mind of that artist. For example, an artist that followed the Cartesian perspectivalism model during the Renaissance was most likely influenced and intrigued by the advances occurring in the fields of mathematics and science at that time. In a world without photographs or computers, when the only way of permanently capturing a moment was by hand, the ability to represent life in a realistic way must have been very exciting. Although contemporary viewers may criticize the artist’s technique for being cold and too calculated, I’m sure that artist felt he was actually doing the viewer a service by providing the most accurate view possible.
Jay writes that the baroque scopic regime “truly produces one of those ‘moments of unease’ which Jacqueline Rose sees challenging the petrification of the dominant visual order” (18). However, the baroque model would be utterly meaningless without the advances (and shortcomings) of Cartesian perspectivalism. Achieving adequate realism during the Renaissance was essential to the progression of art in the modern era; once painters had established that realism was possible, later painters were free to add new layers of meaning in more creative ways and to do their best to “represent the unrepresentable.” Therefore I believe we should try appreciate visual models by viewing them in their historical context and also to revel “in the possibilities opened up by scopic regimes we have already invented” (20).