Early modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 59

created the early modern world. The scienti c and artistic breakthroughs of

the Renaissance were wrought by synergistic interactions among their practi-
tioners: For example, painter Jan Vermeer was a close friend of Antonie van
Leeuwenhoek, who developed the

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first microscope. Although perspectival
paintings were only viewed by the elite, it was that group that constituted the
key decision-makers of early modern society, and the di

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ff usion of such paint-

ings re ected and sustained a wider discourse of ocularcentrism. Perspective

came to be a metaphor for the entire world of the Renaissance just as
Florence came under the panopticonic gaze of the Medici aristocracy
(Edgerton 1975). Loy (2001) likens the adoption of perspectival painting as a
means of locating space to the adoption of the Anno Domini convention in
marking time: both assumed a universal frame of reference in which events
can be located. As Johnson (2002:118) puts it, the “replacement of aspective
art by perspective art was one of the greatest steps forward in human civiliza-
tion.” Indeed, Edgerton (1975) goes as far as to suggest that perspectival art
and mapping played key roles in Columbus's understanding of the world and
subsequent voyages of discovery.
Renaissance painting also extended into early attempts to represent move-
ment and change. In 1646, for example, Jesuit Athanasius Kircher created
the magic lantern, or phantasmagoria, a projection booth with an arti

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cial
light source cast over 360 degree cylindrical paintings, a Renaissance form of
virtual reality (Hillis 1999). Similarly, Giovanni Battista della Porta invented
the camera obscura , which was originally viewed as a mechanism to compre-
hend the external world provided by god; in the Enlightenment, the camera
obscura would be reinterpreted as a model of objective visual truth. Such
inventions pointed toward the role of the observer in the construction of
meaning, thus forming early moments in the substitution of god's eye by the
Cartesian cogito. Later, the notion was elevated into a metaphor for vision by
the Frankfurt School.
Even at the most intimate level of the individual, the Renaissance recon-
struction of space entered into the self-understanding of the individual as a
sovereign subject. Take, for example, the mirror: although crude mirrors had
been available since the Bronze Age, the Renaissance invention of the glass
mirror and its widespread adoption in daily life made possible the habit of
viewing oneself as others viewed him or her, thus fostering the modern sense
of self-consciousness (Melchior-Bonnet 2002). The mirror literally and

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tively shed light on darkness, re ecting and distorting, allowing individuals to

see themselves as others saw them, and provided a basis for pride, vanity, and
insecurity. Indeed, for many in the rising bourgeoisie, the image in the mirror
attained a greater sense of reality than did the interior self. The mirror more-
over made possible self-portraits. Its ability to sustain and amplify Cartesian
ocularcentrism is self-evident. Thus, from the global scale to that of the
individual, the notion of disembodied, abstract space known to an objective
observer multiplied endlessly, reshaping every facet of the early modern
world.

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