Space and Sovereignty: A Reverse Perspective

Abstract

In this chapter, I intend to investigate the complex relationship between art, space, and sovereignty. In doing so, I analyze how this relation has taken concrete form and coagulated, as it were, in a crucial historical moment: the emergence of linear perspective that inaugurated Renaissance and modern humanism. Focusing on the work and the artistic relation—which has been defined as “the most important in the history of art”—between Masaccio and Masolino da Panicale, my aim is to show how, in the process of secularization, art and politics have been closely interwoven in creating the Cartesian–Hobbesian representation of the modern sovereign state. Looking at the artistic space, therefore, means exploring a ‘multidimensional window’, a liminal category, a crossroads in which space, sovereignty, and secularization intersect and reflect themselves into the aesthetic field, designing (and imposing) a specific vision of modernity and its epistemico-political discourse.

I wish to thank Arthur Bradley, Jonathan Colman, Mick Dillon, Charlie Gere, Gavin Hyman, Martin O’Brien, Rocco Ronchi, and all the participants to the “Art and Sovereignty” conference (DePaul University, Chicago, 17–18 April 2015) for their insightful comments. A special thank goes to my dear friend Ferdinando Tupone for bringing me—in a sunny day in Florence—to admire Masolino’s art. I also thank The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, for their kind permission to reproduce Brook Taylor’s The Visual Pyramid.