Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

along lines running from the painter to the horizon.Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air ofrespectful decency, which comes of their being held beneath agaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do notinvolve the viewer. They are polite company: the gaze passeswithout hindrance over a landscape which offers no resistanceto this supremely easy movement. But this is not how theworld appears when we encounter it in perception. When ourgaze travels over what lies before us, at every moment we areforced to adopt a certain point of view and these successivesnapshots of any given area of the landscape cannot be superimposedone upon the other. It is only by interrupting thenormal process of seeing that the painter succeeds in masteringthis series of visual impressions and extracting a single,unchanging, landscape from them: often he will close one eyeand measure the apparent size of a particular detail with hispencil, thereby altering it. By subjecting all such details tothis analytical vision, he fashions on the canvas a representationof the landscape which does not correspond to any ofthe free visual impressions. This controls the movement oftheir unfolding yet also kills their trembling life. If manypainters since Cézanne have refused to follow the law of geometricalperspective, this is because they have sought torecapture and reproduce before our very eyes the birth of the53