Outside the Perspectival Paradigm: (Re)-Constructing Pictorial Space in Early Modern China and Contemporary Digital Environments

Art history and popular perception often take pictorial perspective as an essentially European phenomenon, its presumed relation to natural vision generally leaving the cultural specificity of both vision and pictorial values untroubled. Yet via the early modern mobility of images and individuals, the underlying principles of perspective spread across Eurasia in the 17th and 18th centuries, where the technology was astutely perceived and deftly and strategically adapted to endogenous and novel pictorial forms alike. This paper discusses this and subsequent processes of translation through View of Rehe (ca. 1710), a monumental hanging scroll by the Qing court painter Leng Mei. Using a combination of formal and comparative analysis and digital tools, including GIS and three-dimensional spatial modelling, the paper explores the mathematical and technical means by which the work’s seemingly unique approach to constructing pictorial space was achieved. Taking its cue from Criminisi, Kemp, and Zisserman’s essay, “Bringing Pictorial Space to Life,” which examined computational techniques for understanding perspectival space in Italian Renaissance painting, this research counters Eurocentric assumptions about both what constituted “perspective” in the early modern world and the cultural specificity of the software with which we work. Incorporating input from a data scientist, a GIScientist, and an art historian, the results reflect dialogues and tensions between more quantitative/computational and qualitative/descriptive modes of art historical analysis. Finally, this paper suggests ways in which digital tools both allow and compel re-examination of core art historical questions and cultural assumptions, advancing decentred understandings of the past and present.