The variation in painting from 1500s-1900s has been a manipulation of linear perspective. 

1st Contrast  Francesca school Ideal Landscape vs. de Witte’s Protestant Gothic Church
--Dewitt is off axis of symmetry , oblique, and arbitrary line of sight in relation to the structure.  Shows only a portion of the church interior—A Fragment Unrelated to the Rational Form of the Church.  Add to this a specific time, as seen by the light.
In the Francesca we are outside the view, in the de Witte, we are “participants in contingent experience of everyday life.”
 

2nd Contrast Uccello’s A Hunt vs. Degas’s The Racing Field
Three Choices in Perspective Picture
1. arrangement of subject (or moment)
2. point of view
3. scope or frame
A. In Uccello the point of view and frame are established first, creating a “measured stage.”  In Degas, “The world is accepted first as an uninterrupted field of potential pictures.  From his chosen point of view, the artist scans this field with the pyramid of vision, forming his picture by choosing where and when to stop.”
B. Ucello’s visual pyramid is a static, neutral container.  Degas’s is active and plays a decisive role.  There is an asymmetry that excludes as well as includes—there is a life outside the field of view.
C. Uccello worked from pieces to a whole in a synthesis.
Degas worked from a whole to an aspect of the whole in an analysis.

Maximum Density: Pictorial experimentation (derived form the Renaissance linear perspective and its norms) reached a critical stage of sufficnety density to form a new norm.  The old form could not “hold” all the pictorial content.
Photography derives from the new way of seeing found in works such as Degas’s and de Witte’s.
 

2nd Argument
According to Galassi, around 1800 a new pictorial form took shape that did not belong to the mainstream of art but that paved the way for the optics of photography.  Galassi places emphasis on the sketch—especially landscape sketches--as the mode of representation closest to early photography.

Sidebar, on what is real in representation: “In the history of perspective each new norm of pictorial logic, by scuttling an existing convention, appears in its time as an achievement of realism.

2 types of skecthes: one a study of ideas toward a formal painting (ebauche) and the other as a study of nature (etude).  The second had a following in landscape aesthetics and created a subculture of pictorial representation.

Bridging the Gap: Constable and Corot try to bridge the gap between the descriptive observations of the etude and the formal painting.  It is a “struggle between an inherited rhetorical art and an art devoted to individual perceptions of the world” (24 emphasis added).  Increasingly, the idea of unified and singular way of seeing falls apart, and we are left with individual perception.  19th century landscape sketches are the vehicle of change. “The landscape sketches . . . present a new and fundamentally modern pictorial syntax of immediate, synoptic perceptions and discontinuous, unexpected forms.  It is the syntax of an art devoted to the singular and contingent rather than the universal and stable.  It is also the syntax of photography.”

The contrast is between a “picture made up of bits” and a “picture of bits” (21, 25)

“What made a pictorial ‘something’ out of an actual ‘nothing’ was—litterally and metaphorically—the painter’s point of view. . . It is precisely the mediating conditions of perception—the cropping frame, the accidents of light, the relative point of view—that make the pictures here seem real. . . The works appear to be formed by the eye instead of the mind” (27).

Also, nice closing paragraphs 28-29 and nice quotes from Constable p. 25 & 27.