Anastasis: Research in Medieval Culture and Art (May 2015)
The Hierarchical Perspective
Abstract
This paper is focused on the hierarchical perspective, one of the methods for representing space that was used before the discovery of the Renaissance linear perspective. The hierarchical perspective has a more or less pronounced scientific character and its study offers us a clear image of the way the representatives of the cultures that developed it used to perceive the sensitive reality. This type of perspective is an original method of representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface, which characterises the art of Ancient Egypt and much of the art of the Middle Ages, being identified in the Eastern European Byzantine art, as well as in the Western European Pre-Romanesque and Romanesque art. At the same time, the hierarchical perspective is also present in naive painting and infantile drawing. Reminiscences of this method can be recognised also in the works of some precursors of the Italian Renaissance. The hierarchical perspective can be viewed as a subjective ranking criterion, according to which the elements are visually represented by taking into account their relevance within the image while perception is ignored. This paper aims to show how the main objective of the artists of those times was not to faithfully represent the objective reality, but rather to emphasize the essence of the world and its perennial aspects. This may represent a possible explanation for the refusal of perspective in the Egyptian, Romanesque and Byzantine painting, characterised by a marked two-dimensionality.
