Description: This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.
Review Quotes: "First published in 1972, this book is perhaps the first and in many ways still one of the most challenging attempts to apply a consistent semiotic theory to the development of perspectival art from the Renaissance to the present day. By no means a period piece, it is a brilliant and systematic interaction that touches some of the most crucial features of the Western tradition."--Stephen Bann, University of Bristol