Abstract

When I was a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up across the street from the house of Norris K. Smith, an art historian who taught at Washington University. As I have gotten older, I associate this experience with a picture in Smith’s last book–a book about Renaissance perspective and a kind of career summation he published in 1994 called Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View. The picture, painted by the artist Robert Jordan, shows the vantage from the far distance of Perugino’s Sistine fresco, the Christ Giving the Keys of the Church to St Peter. Perugino shows the protagonists front and center, with smaller and inconsequential figures populating the mid ground and distance. But in Jordan’s picture we see Peter and his entourage as tiny figures in the far distance, beheld from over the shoulder of a faraway ball-player in Perugino’s original. Thinking of this image in Smith’s book, recalling the reversed perspectives of life on either side of Cornell Avenue in St. Louis, and considering my difference from Smith, I speculate on the meanings of the words world and space as they relate to Perugino’s painting and to the act of writing art history.

摘要

当我还是个孩子的时候，我在密苏里州的圣路易斯长大，在华盛顿大学任教的艺术史学家诺里斯·K·史密斯 (Norris K. Smith) 家的街对面长大。随着年龄的增长，我将这段经历与史密斯最后一本书中的一幅图片联系起来——一本关于文艺复兴时期观点的书和他在 1994 年出版的一种职业总结，名为“我站在这里：从另一个角度看”。这幅画由艺术家罗伯特·乔丹 (Robert Jordan) 绘制，展示了佩鲁吉诺 (Perugino) 的西斯廷 (Sistine) 壁画、基督将教堂的钥匙交给圣彼得 (St Peter)远处的有利位置. 佩鲁吉诺展示了主角的正面和中央，较小且无关紧要的人物出现在中间和远处。但在乔丹的照片中，我们看到彼得和他的随行人员是远处的小人物，从佩鲁吉诺原版中一个遥远的球手的肩膀上看到。想到史密斯书中的这个形象，回忆起圣路易斯康奈尔大道两侧生活的颠倒视角，并考虑到我与史密斯的不同，我推测世界和空间这两个词的含义与佩鲁吉诺的绘画和写艺术史的行为。