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Perspectivist Aristotelianism: Three Case-Studies of Cinquecento Visual Theory

LARGE NUMBER of sixteenth-century writers were, in some way or other, concerned with the theory of vision. Philosophers and mathematicians commenting upon ancient texts or writing their own works; anatomists studying the function of the organ of sight; men of letters expounding works such as Dante's Divine Comedy; authors of treatises on linear perspective, art or art theory; scholars devising surveys of the sciences; and finally writers on optical matters-all could be faced with the question of how the eye works. This paper will attempt to shed some light on the optical theories available to such writers by examining three particular texts. The way in which they refer to Aristotelian theory in the context of geometrical analyses of vision is in many respects representative of problem-solving in Cinquecento visual theory. Cinquecento writers on optics, or more specifically on the theory of vision, could draw on a great variety of literary traditions. Aristotle discusses vision in three of his works, De anima, De sensu and the Meteorologica. In the sixteenth century these texts were studied with great care, as were many of the numerous commentaries written about them. The dominance of Aristotelianism in the philosophy of the Latin west, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and beyond, largely explains the degree to which the theory of visual intromission found in De anima and De sensu determined Cinquecento studies of vision. At the same time Aristotle's treatises preserved the memory of earlier visual theories such as those of visual extramission and Atomism. Editions of the texts which expound these latter theories, notably those of Plato and Lucretius, gave added weight to nonAristotelian explanations of sight, as did Euclid's geometrical and Galen's physiological analyses. Euclid implies extramission in two postulates of his Optica,' while Galen defends vision by extramission at great length. Finally there was the theory of vision of Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) and his followers, providing a largely coherent account of the geometry, physiology and psychology of vision in terms of visual intromission.2