In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, choosing instead to examine a few discrete moments in the history of Western art. Over the course of four chapters, Summers traces the development of optical theory and its related fields, describing their changing relationship to Western painting from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. According to Summers, the depiction of light and its interaction with representational forms is a phenomenon unique to Western art that has been gradually refined over the course of Western figurative painting with the invention of other optical devices such as foreshortening, modeling, and the portrayal of shadow and highlights. While the development of optics is the principal unifying theme of the book, some of Summers’s most interesting insights stem from his discussion of the metaphysical dimensions of vision and perspective.

Vision, Reflection, and Desire opens with a discussion of the ancient and early Renaissance origins of the science of optics, a highly developed “middle science” that blended abstract principles of mathematics with the empirical study of light. Knowledge of optics, Summers argues, is responsible for the tradition of imitation of appearances in Greek painting, in which the pictorial and the optical are linked by two principles: the expression of the visual in terms of light, dark, and color, and the representation of figures based on geometric principles of light. Summers’s discussion of Greek art is framed by two early painters, Agatharcus of Samos and Apollodorus of Athens, whose ideas survive only in the writings of Vitruvius and Pliny. Agatharcus was renowned for his lost paintings of illusionistic architecture (skenographia), a practice with its origins in stage scenery. Apollodorus was reputed to have been the first to model his figures using shadows, a technique Summers terms skiagraphia. Greek writers consistently associated shadows with the fleeting, mercurial aspects of appearance. Plato, for instance, makes no distinction between shadows and reflections, as both effects are subject to the happenstance position of the figure with respect to a defined light source. Shadows, like rays of light, are fugitive. Appearances, therefore, do not necessarily correspond to truth. Indeed, Plato’s incredulity toward vision is rooted in painting: with its mimetic capacity to fool and excite its viewers, painting was not to be trusted.

Though some optical features persisted in painting during the Middle Ages, optics and painting largely diverged until scientific advances in the Islamic world made their way to Europe in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. Chapter 2 of Vision, Reflection, and Desire jumps forward in time to the early Italian Renaissance, discussing the roles of Alberti and Brunelleschi in the development of painter’s perspective (prospettiva) and its origins in the optical investigations of Ptolemy and the Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham, known to the West as Alhazen. Though Brunelleschi’s demonstrations led his contemporaries like Antonio Manetti to credit him with the invention of painter’s perspective, it is clear that the highly intellectual environment of early fifteenth-century Florence was fertile ground for the development of a science of vision.

Chapter 3 turns our attention to northern Europe and extends Summers’s inquiry from pure optics to the related discipline of cartography. Here the author undertakes a reconstruction of a lost world map painted by Jan van Eyck using a written account by Bartolommeo Fazio and a number of subsequent depictions of the world apparently based on Van Eyck’s original. As with his discussion of Agatharcus’s missing stage scenery, Summers is forced at times to rely on subsequent (albeit tantalizing) historical traces in order to reproduce key works of art. The lack of direct evidence is difficult to overlook. Nevertheless, Summers builds on previous scholarship by Charles Sterling to place Van Eyck’s mapmaking within the context of the Crusades of the late Middle Ages, and in particular the crusading ambitions of his Burgundian patron, Philip the Good (Charles Sterling, “Jan van Eyck avant 1432,” Revue de l’Art 33 (1976): 7–82). But Van Eyck’s map was also part of a longer tradition of world maps dating back to Ptolemy that employed the technology of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Among the few extant clues is an early sixteenth-century map by Juan de Cáceres, an indirect copy of Van Eyck’s lost work that Fazio claims allowed for distances between physical locations to be calculated by measuring their counterparts on the map. Summers argues that the proliferation of such maps at this moment manifested a growing concern for representing virtual space during the Renaissance and, we may assume, for the ongoing application of geometric principles to vision.

Summers’s fourth and final chapter alternates between the work of Van Eyck and that of the slightly younger Italian painter and theorist Leon Battista Alberti. As numerous scholars have noted over the years, there are undeniable similarities in the work of both artists; Summers points, for example, to the similar uses of light effects in the Ghent Altarpiece and the Brancacci Chapel. Alberti’s investigations into the nature of light took a more theoretical turn, however. Prior to the publication of the Latin version of his treatise On Painting, Alberti undertook a series of experiments using mirrors that explored some of the geometric principles of reflection. Van Eyck was similarly attuned to the special implications of mirrors, though Summers argues that the mirror operates primarily as metaphor in his paintings: at least three works, including the Annunciation scene from the Ghent Altarpiece, incorporate the biblical metaphor of the Virgin as a “mirror without stain.” The mirror’s reflective property had its own moral significance, however, stretching back to the classical tradition. On the one hand, mirrors were instruments of self-reflection (as in, for example, the famous Delphic injunction to “know thyself”). But this can go too far, and mirrors could just as easily cater to vanity and narcissism. For this reason, Alberti’s rather arch reference to Narcissus as the “inventor” of painting is perhaps deliberately provocative, raising questions concerning the moral implications of painting itself and the status of the image vis-à-vis reality.

Vision, Reflection, and Desire is an original and important contribution to the growing body of literature on the relationship between optics and art. Readers looking for an exhaustive treatment of the subject may be disappointed: originating from a series of lectures, Summers’s book provides a well-researched but somewhat disjointed collection of case studies. It is not immediately apparent how the four chapters cohere apart from falling under the general rubric of optics and its associated areas. Chapter 3, for example, has little to do with vision or optics per se, but is concerned instead with the related “middle science” of cartography. Nevertheless, Summers’s eagerness to explore the subject of vision and its related fields in the context of the early Northern Renaissance is particularly refreshing and deserves further study. Moreover, as Summers argues at various points in the book, the application of scientific principles to vision was an important step in the formation of modern Western subjectivity—the “I,” we might say, in cogito ergo sum.

Returning in his afterword to the concept of the subject, Summers briefly traces the shift in Western thought from a purely mechanical understanding of perspective to a material and ultimately metaphorical one, which he terms the “material subject.” As Summers points out, the uniqueness and sensuality of the material subject have important implications for the way we experience the world. In this sense, the physical phenomena described by Alhazen, Alberti, and others were prescient, as modern theories gradually moved away from the Cartesian notion of the incorporeal, absolute subject in order to formulate experience as both materially and culturally defined. But what are the implications of this sea change in Western consciousness, particularly within the realm of art? Summers suggests a few possibilities, though there is much to be gained from further answers to the question. It may yet be premature to claim the material subject as “one of the great achievements of the modern West.” Vision, Reflection, and Desire nevertheless offers several compelling arguments for the ways in which Western art has been shaped by more than two millennia of inquiry into vision and optics.