Seven Prolegomenae to a Brief Treatise on Magrittian Tropes

In 1928 Magritte painted The False Mirror. This giant eye whose iris, pierced by a black pupil, reflects a sky with clouds is, as we know, an adaptation of theme of a well-known engraving which adorns volume by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux entitled Architecture Considered in Its Relation to Art, Social Custom, and Law. This image showed an eye in whose iris was reflected interior of theater of Besangon. Ledoux had conceived that theater as a vast hemicycle, which had acquired, as he put it, the strength of semicircle, only form to reveal all scenes of theater; it had also granted every spectator the right to an equal sight-line.'1 And it is surely in perfect convergence of forms-spherical for eye and ideal for theater--that origin of this engraving is to be seen. It is there in convergence between organ of sight and edifice celebrating visibility, there in this equal sight-line common to instruments of vision and of spectacle, and there in that curvature, identical in monument which stages and retina which registers. If through physiological congruence, theater was, as it were, perfect reflection of ocular globe, that globe was reciprocally perfect mirror of theater. As a neoclassicist, Ledoux seems, in regard to this belief, to extend doctrine of quattrocento painters, who had also conceived a perfect correlation between space of mathematics and that of a psycho-physiology. Thus Leonardo, in what he called painters' visual faculty, had remarked upon

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Architecture and Art History Studies · Philosophy · Psychology

• Art as Play

  Ellen Handler Spitz•American imago•2009

  Add to list

• Nonsense, wherein there is Method”

  Ross Shields•The Germanic Review Literature…•2018

  Add to list