REVERSE PERSPECTIVE: ANOTHER ICON MYTH | ICONS AND THEIR INTERPRETATION. Look about for a few minutes on Internet icon sites, or read the beginning of most any popular book on icons, and you will find a great deal made of the notion that icons rely on something called “reverse perspective” or “inverse perspective,” which theoretically opens up the space of an icon so that, as various people phrase it, “the viewer is part of the icon,” or “God in the icon looks at the viewer,” or “the icon looks at the viewer rather than the viewer looking at the icon.”
Now if such statements seem to you initially to be nonsense, hold on to that feeling; you are on to something. Further, most of those who write about inverse/reverse perspective do not know that the term comes not from some Medieval Slavic or Greek manuscript, but rather from writings from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: Inverse or reverse perspective is just the opposite. On the footstool, we see that the platform is wider at the rear than at the front. Like this: Like Loading... Patrick Hughes - Reverse Perspective Paintings. Reverse perspective. On the left the perspective of a cube, on the right the reverse perspective. The throne and footstool in this icon show reverse perspective, with lines converging towards the viewer. Reverse perspective, also called inverse perspective, inverted perspective or Byzantine perspective, is a convention of perspective drawing where the further the objects are, the larger they are drawn.
The lines diverge against the horizon, rather than converge as in linear perspective. Technically, the vanishing points are placed outside the painting with the illusion that they are "in front of" the painting. The name Byzantine perspective comes from the use of this perspective in Byzantine and Russian Orthodox icons; it is also found in East Asian art, and was sometimes used in Cubism and other movements of modern art. Other uses of the term[edit] See also[edit] ArcelorMittal Orbit, which features two mirrors that produce reverse perspective reflections of viewers. External links[edit] Reverse perspective in Christian iconography | The peacock's tail. A visual paradox Euclid in his work “Optics” (around 300 B.C.), the first scientific work to relate the theory of vision to Mathematics, noted that when observing a sphere from a fixed position it is possible to view more than half of its surface.
As each eye views the sphere from a different viewpoint, the visual perception is created by the images of two spherical caps, the combined result of which may, under certain conditions, add up to more than a hemisphere’s surface. Though seemingly paradoxical, a similar claim can be made for other sufficiently small shapes such as a cubic die of which one may view four sides at the same time. Indeed, holding a die in close distance from the eyes and orienting it in a way that e.g. the 6 is on top and the 5 faces the observer, one sees at the same time a “4, 5, 6” arrangement with the left eye and a “3, 5, 6” arrangement with the right eye. Linear perspective and the unique viewpoint principle Conventional and reverse linear perspective. Reverse perspective.