Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 599 Nilsson’s Primitive Time-Reckoning, Zerubavel’s Hidden Rhythms and Seven Day Circle, Michael Young’s Metronomic Society, or some of the material in the various works written or edited by J. T. Fraser. Not for the Mayans and other pre-Columbians, however. Aveni deals with them expertly and lovingly, and they make the best part of the book, carrying the reader into other temporal worlds. These chapters go far to prove his principal thesis, namely, that time consciousness and measurement are cultural constructs, are responses to social needs, and affirmations of collective values. We have our time, and other people have theirs. All these times work, that is, they are anthropo­ logically equal. Technologically, however, some time systems are more equal than others. David S. Landes Dr. Landes, professor in the Harvard University Department of Economics, is the author of Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modem World. The Science ofArt: Optical Themes in Western Artfrom Brunelleschi to Seurat. By Martin Kemp. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. Pp. viii + 375; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $60.00. Few topics have been more extensively debated than the origin and role of perspective in art. Invented (or reinvented) by the Florentine sculptor and architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377—1446), it quickly became one of the standard techniques that every artist had to learn. Some even became obsessed by its beauty. The great biographer of the Italian artists, Giorgio Vasari, tells the story of the painter Paolo Uccello (1397—1475), whose fascination with its intricacies led him to spend his nights before his easel. “Oh, what a delightful thing is this perspective!” he was heard to murmur when his wife would encour­ age him to come to bed. Over the centuries fascination with those tricks of perspective, to make a two-dimensional surface mimic the qualities of a three-dimensional object, have dazzled many. In The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, British art historian Martin Kemp has written an encyclopedic ac­ count of the techniques of perspective construction and color theory as they apply to the representation of three dimensions. It is a remarkable handbook and strongly recommended to historians of technology. It supersedes earlier and more specialized books on the subject such as the long-standard work by John White, The Birth and Rebirth ofPictorial Space (London, 1967). The book is divided into three parts, the first dealing with perspec­ tive practice, the second dealing with the machines and construction techniques for perspective, and the third dealing with the role ofcolor 600 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE in reading the effects of perspective. Each is organized chronologi­ cally so there is a certain amount of recapitulation and the reader is sometimes asked to defer a question until the next part; but the wait is worth it, for this is a book of remarkable clarity. In Part I (“Linear Perspective”) Kemp gives an overview of the way pictorial space was organized by painters from the early 1300s in Italy to the early 19th century. The three chapters that form this section are descriptive in nature and collect together the major demonstrations of perspective as it was used—by painters. The key event is clearly the manufacture of the two perspective panels by Brunelleschi to show the Palazzo Vecchio and the Baptistery in Florence. Held by the viewer, who looked at them in a mirror, these panels were tiny courtly demonstration pieces. Yet the quality of their spatial illusion must have been transformative, for in succeeding years the sculptor Dona­ tello and the painter Masaccio began to adopt their perspective techniques. Kemp’s discussion of Donatello’s reliefs, St. George and the Dragon (ca. 1417) and the Feast of Herod (1423—27), and Masaccio’s painting The Trinity (ca. 1426), are exemplary. Here, and throughout the book, are excellent line drawings that make it possible to follow the argument with relative ease. Kemp deals extensively with Leonardo da Vinci (on whom he has written in the past), Albrecht Diirer, perspectival illusionists around 1500, and Galileo, and he concludes with the British painter J. M. W. Turner...